A year ago we posted a compendium of Cloud and Cloud Security resources. This posting has been consistently among the top hits to the Cloud Security Blog proving that, when it comes to Cloud the one thing we all need is clarity!

In a recent eWeek interview, Citrix CTO Simon Crosby described Conficker malware as “the world’s largest cloud.” He’s right. Cybercriminals use Conficker to create massive clouds of remotely-controlled PCs capable of carrying out a variety of cyber-attacks, including DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks on a scale larger than any centralized cloud provider could. We…

It’s exciting to see that the GSA is leading the way to modernize the federal government’s IT by moving to “the cloud.” However, in the rush to save money, the GSA may be repeating some mistakes that company IT departments have already made. Until cloud vendors step up to guarantee that their security is on par with enterprise security, they will be a poor choice for our government agencies. We don’t need another WikiLeaks.

2009 has been a notable year for malware and malicious online activity for a number of reasons and several of them relate to what is known as botnets. A zombie, or a bot, is a PC infected by malware that brings it under the remote control of a criminal. Criminals run networks that can range…

Recently, there have been some high profile failures of cloud computing, including the Sidekick outage, the DDos attack on Amazon’s EC2 and disruption to Google’s hosted email. Following these debacles, some people have expressed scepticism about the cloud computing model. For example, a response to a CNET article was: “Putting all your beans in a…

T-Mobile USA’s Sidekick mobile phone service operated by Microsoft’s Danger subsidiary encountered a service disruption that resulted in some Sidekick phone customers losing their personal information including contact names, phone numbers and digital photos (the New York Times had a summary, and The Register has some juicy speculation on the origin of the outage). Many…

Cloud-based security as a service offerings have seen a steady increase in popularity, due to the benefits that the deployment model provides. Security as a service enables rapid provisioning, cost savings and enhanced security through real-time updates and the community effect. With the explosive adoption of public cloud computing it’s time we apply the techniques…